


the book is closed and the story told

by Duck_Life



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast), The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Arson, Basira Hussain is Ashes O'Reilly, Beholding Avatar Basira Hussain, Bitterness, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Desolation Avatar Basira Hussain, Gen, Hilltop Road, Parallel Universes, Post-Apocalypse, Suicidal Thoughts, The Mechanisms-Typical Violence, The Usher Foundation (The Magnus Archives)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-18
Updated: 2020-11-18
Packaged: 2021-03-06 10:13:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25967932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Duck_Life/pseuds/Duck_Life
Summary: Jon and Basira escape their dying world through the rift in the house at Hilltop Road.
Relationships: Basira Hussain & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Jonny d'Ville & Ashes O'Reilly
Comments: 41
Kudos: 204





	1. the book is lying open

The rift between worlds seals so suddenly that when Jon tries to throw himself back through his shoulder slams against solid wall. A few cobwebs shake loose above him. “What the  _ fuck _ ,” he shouts, terror and rage drowning out any other emotion. “Basira!”

“It’s over. We’re through to the other side,” she says firmly. Her face is coated in soot and ashes, and her eyes burn brightly in the dark basement. “There’s no going back, Jon.”

“We have to,” he demands, shaking. “Martin is— we have to  _ go _ , have to get him and bring him—”

“He’s gone,” she says. Her voice isn’t unkind, it’s just… factual. A statement. “The place was crumbling around us, Jon, I could only grab one of you—”

“Why the  _ fuck _ did you pick me then?” he says, whirling on her in a fury. “The world ended. You could’ve let me end with it, probably  _ wanted _ to, why did you grab my arm instead of Martin’s? Why?”

“Jon—”

“ _ Why _ ?”

Even though he’s shouting, even though he’s so angry he can barely stop the tears from flowing, his voice seems somehow… flat. Empty. 

Basira notices. “Can’t compel me anymore,” she points out. “Looks like your spooky powers belonged to the other universe.” 

He doesn’t need them. He lunges at her in grief and anger. “You left him to  _ die _ ,” he shouts, hands fisting in the material of her jacket. “Martin  _ fucking _ Blackwood was the one worth saving,  _ not _ me and you know it.  _ Why _ ?”

“I don’t know!” she shouts back, their faces too close. “It was a split-second decision and I  _ don’t know _ why it was you instead of him. To be honest, Jon, it was probably just because you were standing closer at the time. But it’s over, it’s in the past, and we’re here now. So… so if you’re going to kill me, go ahead and do it. And be left all alone in an unfamiliar universe.” 

For a moment, they just stand there, wedged into each other’s personal space and feeling all the pain and fear and loss swarm around them like so many biting gnats. She lost Daisy days ago. Jon lost Martin minutes ago. Both losses are a universe away, in a dead world caved in on itself.

Finally, finally, Jon sighs and lets go. He steps away, feeling as his skeleton and soul adjust to this new and foreign universe. 

Martin is gone. Dead.

Their world is dead. 

“Jesus Christ,” Jon mumbles, staring down at the dusty basement floor of the house on Hilltop Road. “Jesus Christ.” Adrift in a world that is not his own, the Archivist sinks to his knees and weeps for his lost love. 

  
  
  
  
  


Basira and Jon exist as refugees of a dead world, drifting through a foreign universe with no anchors but each other. And that’s when they can bear to sit in the same room together. Basira tends toward the pragmatic, going out and finding a job and finding an apartment. 

Jon relishes his severance from the Eye as much as he grieves the loss. He still Knows too much, all the knowledge he’d accumulated back in his universe of origin. Without the Beholding to manage it, all that Knowledge crowds his skull. He can feel it pushing on the back of his eyeballs. 

Basira brings up the Extinction one night, while they’re wedged together on the sofa with a bottle of whiskey. “I never researched it as much as Martin did,” she says, not meeting Jon’s eyes. “But… well, the human race we knew is dead, isn’t it? We’re all that’s left. That sounds more Extinction-y than anything else.” 

“I suppose,” Jon says, staring into the bottle. 

“Yeah.” Basira coughs. “We’re the only ones left. Our world is gone.” 

“We’re… we’re our own archive now, aren’t we,” Jon muses. “All that’s left of the world we left behind.”

  
  
  
  
  


Jon storms into the flat they’ve been sharing and slams the door. “There’s one here,” he says, waving a flyer in front of him. 

Basira glances up from the coffee table, where she’s been methodically taking apart her gun and putting it back together. “One what?”

“Another Magnus Institute.” Jon drops the flyer in front of her with a scowl. He sits beside her for a moment, but the restless energy in his legs drags him right back up again and sets him to pacing across the floor. “It’ll happen again, it’ll happen here. Whatever poor fool sitting in the role of Archivist will bring on the apocalypse, and we’ll have lived through the destruction of  _ two _ worlds.” 

“Jon,” Basira says, eyes skating over the flyer. “How closely have you looked at this?” 

“Well,” he says, “I pretty much saw the logo and ran here. Looks like they’re asking for statements, right?”

“Yeah,” Basira says. “Look at the bottom.” 

He does. “Fucking hell.”

“Yeah.”

In small font near the bottom of the page, the contact information for the staff of this universe’s Magnus Institute is listed beside their extensions. 

The first line reads: Head of the Institute — Director Sims.

  
  


Jon spends about two days processing this new information about the strange parallel world. There’s another version of him, a version who ascended to Elias Bouchard’s role. 

“So the other me,” Jon says, “he’ll end this world. He will. Same as me. Or else, or else… he’ll make someone else do it. Shit.” 

“Might not even be you,” Basira reasons.

“What?”

“He’s the head of the Institute,” she says. “Back in our world, only ever one man got to hold that position.” She looks at him steadily and says, in a low voice, “Wonder what you look like with green eyes.”

“Right. That’s, that... ” He rakes his hands through his unruly hair. “Fine. I know what I need to do.” 

“You  _ what _ ?”

“The other me,” Jon says. “Maybe he’s just me or maybe, maybe he’s Jonah… it doesn’t matter. I have to kill him.” 

“You’re… going to kill… yourself?”

“I mean,” Jon huffs. “There are two of me. That’s… it’s not right. And I know for certain I’m not going to set off the apocalypse. Again. I can’t say the same for  _ him _ .” 

“O… kay,” she says, watching him carefully. Jon can’t help but wonder if Daisy ever discussed her murder plans with Basira like this. No, he thinks, she’d preferred to turn a blind eye. Let everything sit in the dark. They can’t do that here. “You’re sure you can go through with it?”

“I’m…” He’s killed before. Other avatars. This version of him… well, he can’t have gotten to the top of the Magnus Institute without serving the Eye. Jon doesn’t know his path, can’t know that kind of thing here, but he’s pretty sure he won’t be killing anyone human.

And it’s not as if it’s the first time he’s contemplated his own demise. 

“Yes,” he says finally. “I know I can do this.” 

“You really think so.”

“I’m not asking your permission or your… your approval,” he says. 

“Then what are you asking for?”

“... A gun.” 

She doesn’t ask him whether he knows how to use it. She just hands it to him. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


Jon doesn’t recognize the receptionist at the front desk of the Institute. Evidently, she doesn’t recognize him either because she just gives him her bland customer service smile. Not the way you’d look at your boss. 

This other universe’s Jonathan Sims must look quite different. Maybe he wears his hair differently, or maybe he’s not riddled with the scars Jon has. Jon wonders if he’ll take the chance to get a good look at him before taking him out. 

He honestly doesn’t know. 

“I’m here to, um… statement,” he mumbles. 

“Of course,” she says, nodding sympathetically. “Basement level. I’ll buzz you in.” 

The layout of this Archives is nearly identical to the one Jon remembers. There’s an extra door here and there, which sets his nerves prickling as he considers parallel versions of the Distortion. He shakes off the old anxieties. He’s here on a mission. 

Director Sims’ desk faces away from the glass window of his office, so the first look Jon gets is of the back of his head. He does wear his hair differently— shorter, with the ends curling over his ears. There’s a lot more gray in his hair than in Jon’s own, spreading thickly through from the roots rather than sprinkled in throughout. 

There’s a part of Jon that’s worried that he won’t be able to go through with this if he doesn’t catch his other self off-guard. Not necessarily because he’s afraid the other Jonathan Sims will overtake him, but because he’s afraid he’ll seize up the moment this alternate version of himself begins to speak. 

Or, of course, there’s the possibility that this is just Jonah Magnus wearing him like a suit. Jon doesn’t know how to deal with that other than shooting fast and going for the eyes. 

He opens the door. When Director Sims glances up, Jon takes the shot and fires. 

The other man doesn’t even shout, just lets out a quiet sort of gasp and slides to the floor, blood spreading rapidly from the wound in his chest. Jon missed the eyes, but that’s alright. He’s not out of bullets. He cocks the gun, aims and— 

And Director Sims looks at him. 

His eyes aren’t the sickly green of Jonah Magnus. 

They aren’t Jon’s eyes, either. 

They widen in confusion and surprise, looking him up and down. And for a moment, Jon has no idea who this stranger is. And then, like a newsreel erupting in his brain, he sees the photographs that lined his grandmother’s mantelpiece. He recalls blurry memories of warmth and safety, so many years before the Spider marked him. 

His father says, “Jonny?” Jon just stares, barely noticing the gun shaking in his hand. “Jonny, h-how are you alive?” 

Distantly, Jon is latching onto the information and filing it away, classifying it, adding it to his library of knowledge. In this universe, his father survived his accidental fall. In this universe, Jon is dead. In this universe, his father somehow ended up the head of the Magnus Institute. 

In this universe, his father dies not from a fall but from a bullet fired by his own son. 

“Hilltop Road,” Jon says, walking further into the room. He crouches beside his father, dropping the gun to his side. “The rift.”

“Of course,” his father sighs as if it were obvious. “You’re from the other side.”

“It’s gone,” he says, his voice hoarse. “The other universe. It’s… I destroyed it.”

“Good Lord,” his father says. The building creaks around them, joists settling and cracking like the hull of an old ship. “You’ve been busy.” 

“I didn’t think—” Jon looks down at the gun he’s still clutching. “I didn’t know that you were… I thought you were me. I sh-shot you because I thought you were me.” 

His father says only, “Ah.” His eyes drift shut, and it looks like it takes some effort for him to open them again. Dust drifts from the ceiling as the building shakes. “You were trying to stop me from going after the Watcher’s Crown then.”

“How do you know… ?”

His father laughs quietly. “I Know everything,” he says. “I Know too much. Truth be told, I’m a little relieved I’ll finally get to stop Knowing so much.” 

“Dad…” 

Jon can’t make himself understand, can’t bend and warp the sight in front of him into a shape that makes sense. He feels like he has to; his father is fading fast. 

“I forgive you, son,” Jon’s father says as he starts to slide away. “There was… no other way our story could’ve ended.” He sucks in a rattling breath. The building seems to echo it, bits of plaster raining down from the ceiling and walls. “You probably already know, Jonny, but… when I die, the Institute falls with me.” 

He’d been willfully ignoring that part, thinking only of saving the world. But it’s hard to ignore it as the building threatens to collapse around him. 

“Best get going,” Jon’s father says, patting Jon on the arm. 

Jon runs through the collapsing building as wooden beams and bits of masonry fall down around him. His father’s blood is on his hands, not to mention the employees all throughout the building. He marches on toward home.

And he nearly makes it out. 

  
  
  


When Jon wakes up, he’s staring at a ceiling he doesn’t recognize. He turns his head to see a sliver of light peeking through old motheaten drapes, a bedside table shrouded by dust. The mattress beneath him is sunken in places. His chest hurts. 

There’s a woman on the other side of the room. 

She tells him she’s a doctor, and that she pulled him from the rubble of the Magnus Institute. She tells him that when she found him there was a spike of rebar speared through his heart, and she’d had to replace the damaged organ. 

His chest hurts. He can feel something spooling inside, clicking out his heartbeats one after the other. It feels like—

She tells him the tape recorder had appeared beside his unconscious body. She tells him it had seemed more intent on keeping him alive than any other part of him, and so she’d installed it in place of his heart. 

It’s only then that Jon realizes that, while the doctor has been telling him all of these things, her mouth hasn’t moved once. 

“Oh good,” Jon says, drifting somewhere beyond caring, “they have vampires in this world, too.” 

  
  
  


When Jon finally sees Basira again, she looks surprised to see him alive. “Whole building just sunk in on itself,” she says, her eyes flicking over him. “Figured that meant you were successful. And dead, too.”

Jon presses a hand against his chest, where he can feel the subtle rhythm of the tape recorder reeling away to keep him alive. “I’m beginning to think I can’t die,” he says. 

“The other version of you did, though.”

Jon looks down at his hands. “It was my dad.”

“ _ What _ ?” 

“The director of the Magnus Institute,” he explains flatly. “It wasn’t me. It was my father.” 

Basira opens her mouth to say something, but at this point she realizes it would just be more noise. Jon killed the head of the Institute and the Institute fell, too. Jon killed his father, and Basira really doesn’t know what effect that’s going to have on Jon. 

Or if any of it even matters at this point. 

Jon doesn’t tell her about Dr. Carmilla.

Not for a long time. 


	2. hand me the matches and the gasoline, 'cause we've got work to do

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Fall of the House of Usher

Strange as it is, life goes on. If you could really call it life. There’s no more Magnus Institute, and Jon and Basira don’t see anything new coming to claim its place. Jon does tell Basira about the Usher Foundation, and suggests that if the Magnus Institute existed in this other world, the American version of it probably existed as well. 

Basira fixates on that, wonders quietly (and aloud, and late into the night) whether the Usher Foundation is headed by someone as sadistic and ambitious as Jonah Magnus. If it is, she sees it as her duty to take it down. 

“Why yours?” Jon asks one night, as he tries to quiet the clicking of his new heart with whiskey and bad poetry. 

“Only fair,” Basira shrugs. “You got the first one.” 

But there are more pressing matters than the Usher Foundation. Particularly one Arthur Nolan. No files survived of the Magnus Institute (from either universe), but Basira’s got a mind like a steel trap. She remembers the names and locations of plenty of avatars and suspected avatars. 

As it turns out, this world’s version of Nolan is up to the same business as the one they know and loathe— unsafe tenements, burned-out houses, innocent people boiled alive in their bathtubs. 

Basira makes it her job to douse his fire. It doesn’t take her long. 

After Nolan, she gets more methodical. Makes lists and maps, keeps track of avatars who died in the other world but continue to wreak havoc in this one, adds the names of new people she’s only just finding out about. 

In this universe, Michael Crew and Jared Hopworth are still alive. 

Basira corrects that oversight. 

For nearly a decade, Basira hunts avatars across the country. She works with the kind of keen determination that Jon recognizes from audio recordings of the late Gertrude Robinson. And Jon lets her, because he’s tired. Because he knows he has no high ground from which to speak, and the blood of every Institute employee from this world rests on his hands (not to mention the entire world he ruined and discarded.) Jon watches as Basira gradually becomes the thing she had to kill in Daisy. 

It’s Callum Brodie that finally breaks his silence.

The kid is in his twenties now, still tormenting children by shutting them in dark cupboards and haunting their nightmares with oozing pitch-blackness. Basira sees the job as cut and dry. Jon just sees the same 13-year-old punk he encountered in the other universe. 

“It’s not the Hunt, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Basira says, squaring up against Jon as he stands blocking the door to their flat. “No fangs, no… no urges. I know what I’m doing. I’m… I’m in control.”

“I know,” he says, eyes red-rimmed and tired. “Somehow I think that’s worse.” 

“You can’t stop me.”

“I know,” he says again. “But I can’t stand by and watch, either. Done too much of that. If you keep going down this road, I have to leave.”

“Where?”

“Don’t know,” Jon says. “You won’t be able to find me, though.” The Eye protects its children from each other. Over the past decade, Jon’s Beholding powers have slowly begun slinking back. Not to the level they were at before, nowhere near that apocalyptic, but every now and then he just Knows things. 

Basira does, too. And she knows now what he’s getting at— if she continues taking down avatars in the way she’s been, Jon will leave. And whether she likes him or hates him, or, god forbid, loves him, he’s her only connection to her dead universe. 

To be completely cut off from that last tether would be… bad. 

But she also can’t stand here staring at his concerned fucking face. So she drops her can of kerosene and storms out the door, doesn’t stop running until she reaches America. 

Away from London, Basira’s grand plans become a bit more coherent and constructive. (As much as they were inherently destructive.) She stops tracking down individual avatars, instead focusing on derailing rituals. 

She knows they’re all doomed to fail anyway, but she also knows she can do some damage control. Blow up the meat pit before too many bodies go into the grinder, set the ferry alight before it can depart with its damned passengers. Stop the rituals early, minimize the deaths. 

Like Gertrude, she uses fire. 

She’s also aware that it’s entirely likely any of the Entities could manage what Jonah Magnus did in pulling all the fears through at once. Only reason it happened with the Eye is that Magnus was the first one to think of it. In her research and her travels, Basira remains wary that someone else could very easily have the same idea as Jonah Magnus. And she intends to stop them before they do. 

And then there’s the matter of the Usher Foundation. Basira was right in her initial suspicions— the place is no better than the Magnus Institute, and maybe worse. Instead of serving the Eye, the foundation was bought out early on by Chicago’s answer to the Cult of the Lightless Flame: Smooth Mickey and the Lucky Sevens. 

“Smooth” Mickey, nicknamed for his burned-off fingertips and smooth, wax-like skin, tricks folks all over into gambling away their money, their houses, even their lives for a chance at peace. The Usher Foundation collects statements, keeping tabs on all the other Entities to make sure that the Desolation always comes out on top. 

Basira only figures all this out after she shows up at an old meatpacking plant to burn the place down and finds it already smoldering. 

It’s not long after that she decides the only way to take Smooth Mickey down is from the inside. It’s not exactly a great plan, but when her level-headedness and her determination come into conflict, it’s the latter that always wins. 

When she applies for the Archival position, she lists experience with the Magnus Institute. She also uses a fake name— maybe a bit on the nose, but hardly less creative than “Smooth Mickey.” 

The call comes three days later. “Welcome to the family, Ashes.” 

As Ashes, Basira finds ways to use the Usher Foundation’s resources to stop rituals all over North America. With Smooth Mickey and the Lucky Sevens, she derails a train in Minnesota doomed for a twisting spiral route to nowhere and stops a deep pit in Louisiana from swallowing a city. 

Pitting the Desolation against every other Entity isn’t exactly easy to do with a clear conscience, but it’s not like it’s different from doing the same thing with the Eye. 

And Ashes knows how to play all the archivists and assistants against each other, how to push the Usher Foundation’s destructive tendencies toward self-destruction. They trick assistants into taking on avatars they can’t handle, and then Ashes swoops in afterward to clean up the mess. 

The Usher Foundation dwindles, and Smooth Mickey can’t replace his archivists fast enough. The embers begin to die out. 

Unfortunately for Ashes, Mickey figures out what they’re up to all too soon. 

Doctor Carmilla finds her nearly dead from the smoke inhalation— but only nearly. The mechanical lungs the good doctor gifts her— or curses her with— are just what Basira needs to finish the Usher Foundation once and for all. 

Turns out, with enough gasoline you  _ can _ kill an avatar of the Desolation through fire. Smooth Mickey screams as he burns. 

It sounds lovely. 

Decades pass in this fashion. Basira sheds her old name and starts going by Ashes after the smoldering ruins of the places they leave behind. They eventually join back up with Jon, and the two of them set out to take down as many rituals as possible, knowing full well that none of it really matters in the end. But at least the violence breaks up the monotony. 

Jonny still makes statements, sometimes of the wreckage of whatever this year’s failed ritual was, sometimes of strangers in nearby cities. Never pulls them directly from the source— Ashes makes sure of that. But he doesn’t need to ask any questions to know people’s stories, these days. Not all of his old Beholding powers have returned, but he does have a knack for sniffing out a good story. 

When his statements start to get more and more lyrical, Ashes suggests he start making them into actual songs. Instead of just whatever morbid word vomit he spits out of his tape recorder heart, he could put pen to paper and, in Ashes’ words, “at least get some goddamn entertainment out of it.”

So he starts writing songs. Some are based on statements, a couple are based on his own muddled life. He writes a song about Ashes and how they got their mechanical lungs, and they threaten to shoot Jonny before reading over the lyrics and deciding that, actually, they aren’t that bad. 

Ashes and Jonny return to London, long after anyone who would have recognized them from their old lives is long gone. Jonny keeps his eyes open for statements, stories and song ideas. Ashes keeps their ears perked for any information about avatars or rituals. 

Once Ashes gets bored and rediscovers a fondness for the electric bass, it’s really only a matter of time before they and Jonny join up with Grifter’s Bone. 


	3. Interlude: Flesh and Blood (Skin and Bone)

Writing and singing for Grifter’s Bone, it’s strange. Jonny greets the crowd, sings his songs and watches with some satisfaction as they proceed to tear each other apart. Ripping and rending and tearing and blood— it’s like a mosh pit gone wrong, every single show. He feels bad about it sometimes— as much as his mechanical heart will allow. 

For a good ten years, Jon’s beginning to feel like Georgie (and fuck’s sake, when was the last time he thought about Georgie?). He doesn’t feel fear anymore. For so long it controlled his life, and now he just doesn’t feel it— or any other emotion, really. 

Sometimes there’s satisfaction. Sometimes a cruel glee when he looks at what his music has wrought. Serving the Slaughter feels pure in a way serving the Eye never did— no secret plans, no master plots or twisted threads. Just senseless violence. 

Fear spikes in him once more the day he hears the Angel sing. 

The first time the Angel opens for Grifter's Bone, Jonny breaks out all over in a cold sweat. He startles Ashes, yells at Al Grifter, demands to know who this new act is. "Calls herself the Angel," Grifter tells him with a shrug. "You know as much as I do." 

Jonny does eventually get the Angel’s story out of her. “The eyes,” she explains to him one night, in a shadowy bar over whiskey sours, “there was a, um. Well, an incident. Used to work at the Fanton’s department store in Hammersmith. Old building, you know. Back ’round, oh, 2010 I think, there was this high-profile murder right in the store. But, well, I don’t believe in ghosts.”

The Angel takes a sip of her drink. Jonny hasn’t asked her real name. She’s only ever introduced herself by her stage name, and he tries not to ask more questions than he has to. Her story, though. He has to know her story. 

Has to know why their opening act for three shows now has shared the beautiful, bone-chilling voice of Nikola Orsinov. 

“At least, I  _ didn’t _ believe in ghosts,” the Angel goes on. “Until… well, I’d worked a few late shifts. Sometimes I saw things, heard things, that didn’t make sense, but… well, I mean, you try working in a store full of spooky mannequins. Especially knowing that more and more people are experimenting these days with those… what d’you call ’em? Automatons. The clockwork people.” 

Jonny’s seen one or two, as tour guides in museums or else passing out flyers for the Salvation Army. “You were scared.”

“Probably should’ve been more scared,” she admits. “But… well, I thought, maybe there was another person stalking the shelves. That’d be bad, but I… I figured I could defend myself. Chuck a heavy bottle of perfume at them, that sort of thing. And if it  _ was _ some kind of automaton, I could fight it off even easier. But…” Here she shudders, here she sips her whiskey and stares into the past, sightless eyes wide. “The thing that attacked me. I-it wasn’t made of flesh. Wasn’t made of wood either. I still remember its hands on me, ripping,  _ gouging _ … Those hands were cold, hard plastic.” 

“The Stranger.”

“What?”

“That’s, um, that’s…  _ stranger _ than I would’ve expected,” Jonny covers, not really sure if he’s protecting the truth or the Angel. 

“You’re telling me,” she says, apparently in better spirits. Like it’s a relief to share her horrifying tale. “I’d always wanted to be a singer. And once I’d been attacked at my day job, I figured… the kind of scary shit that’s out there, I might as well do what I  _ love _ . Even if some mannequin or ghost is going to kill me.” 

“That’s… that’s rather a nice way of thinking,” Jonny says, meaning it. Considering his “day job” led to ending an entire world, his new gig seems almost cheery in comparison. Good music, good drinks, interesting people. Blood and gore on the weekends. 

Jonny spots the Angel at a few more shows after that. Sometimes she opens for Grifter’s Bone, sometimes she goes on after them. He notices when she starts seeing a young man with a funny-looking mustache and stilted, jerky movements. Jonny’s curious, but he chooses not to pry, not this time. 

Maybe he should have, because it’s not long after that that the Angel vanishes from the music scene. 

Jonny never sees her again, but he does, eventually, hear her voice again.


	4. but all of them fell to his maddened corruption

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Spoilers for MAG 184! Also definitely heed the canon-typical Mechs violence tag. Cw for violence, death, violence, bodily injury, violence... violence

After their guitarist blows himself up setting landmines somewhere in Scotland, Alfred Grifter starts searching for a new one. He haunts music venues and seedy dives all over London looking for a suitable replacement, and when he finally finds someone he’s eager to introduce him to the rest of the band. 

Jon recognizes the newcomer immediately— after all, he used to see the man in his dreams, covered in swarming insects. “You,” he says, stepping forward after the group’s spread out to pack up their instruments, “don’t I know you?” 

The guitarist stares at him blankly. “Well, sure, ol’ man Grifter just told you all my name, so.” 

“No, no, I mean…” Jon stares. “Jordan Kennedy.” The exterminator, the man who’d been in charge of incinerating Jane Prentiss’s body. The man he’d transformed from watched to watcher. It feels like a lifetime ago— in many ways, it was. (He can still see the swarming ants if he shuts his eyes.)

The other man, whom Al Grifter had introduced as “Gunpowder Tim,” drops his smile. “Shh, don’t say that name,” he hisses, “it’s just Tim now, alright? Don’t go saying my old name, I…” He looks around. “I don’t want the bugs to hear.” 

It’s a strange enough thing to say, but Jonny has more than enough scars to know what can happen when the wrong bugs find out where you’re hiding. He gets it. 

What he doesn’t get, at first, is why the man he once knew as Jordan Kennedy hasn’t seemed to age. This alternate version of him wasn’t changed by the Archivist the way his counterpart was. Assuming he has the same birthdate as the version Jon met in his original universe, this man should be almost 100. He looks just as youthful as the day Jon “met” him though— or met an alternate version of him. Flowing brown hair without a spot of gray in it. 

But then it occurs to him that “Gunpowder” Tim probably joined up with the Slaughter long before he joined up with Grifter’s Bone. Fighting the Corruption by aligning with a different entity, much the way Michael Crew joined the Vast to evade the Spiral. 

It suits him. Tim approaches violent shootouts with the same fervor and enthusiasm he brings to his guitar playing. He’s also got a lovely voice. 

* * *

The appearance of the man once called Jordan does lead Jonny to consider things he’s been trying not to think about. Like how similar this universe is to the one he came from, and what familiar faces could be around any corner. 

Sometimes, at his lowest, Jon lets himself wonder about the possibility of another Martin in this universe. He considers the very real possibility that Martin perished when he brought this world’s Institute down, almost a century ago now. 

It’s not until Tim and his partner Bertie begin talking about a slam poet at the Lunar Lounge that Jon realizes a version of Martin still exists here. 

And it doesn’t sound like a very good version. 

“Man’s a terror,” Tim says, sloshing whiskey down his shirtfront while Bertie curls into his side. They’re sitting in the wreckage of their latest massacre, enjoying a few drinks before they pack up their gear. “Calls himself MK Blackwood. He goes to these poetry readings and events all over the country, holds competitions for bright young poets and songwriters with big dreams, and then once they’re all inside he sets the place alight.” Tim laughs. “Gotta say, sounds a hell of a lot more fun than most poetry readings I’ve been to.” 

* * *

Jon quickly becomes obsessed with MK Blackwood. Ashes doesn’t want to hear it. “I mean.  _ We’ve _ become our worst selves,” they reason, lighting a cigar. “Why shouldn’t he?”

“Have we?” Jonny asks, voice softer than they’ve heard it in a long time. “You feel like we’re our worst selves?”

“I  _ feel _ fantastic,” Ashes clarifies. “But that’s, uh, that’s probably for the worst, you know?”

“Yeah,” Jonny sighs. “Yeah.” 

“I just don’t get why you’re so shaken about your old flame becoming an avatar of the Desolation,” Ashes says. “I mean. I did the same thing.” 

“You’re different.”

“How?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “We’re all different. Everything’s different.”

Ashes laughs. “It’s a whole new world.”

He knows. Sometimes he wishes they wouldn’t remind him so much. That the two of them took an opportunity to do better, be better and now choose to waste it away wreaking havoc and destroying lives show after show.

At least it’s fun. 

* * *

As it turns out, the Desolation gets territorial. And MK Blackwood isn’t too fond of a Slaughter-aligned band taking lives and fear that could be, in his opinion, better digested by fire and heat. So he sneaks into one of their shows and sends a sweeping wave of heat through the crowd before Grifter’s Bone can finish their first song of the night. 

The entire audience gets cooked in their seats. 

It’s only when Tim starts screaming that Jon remembers that Bertie was, as usual, sitting in the front row to watch them play. 

* * *

  
  


Jon leaves Tim and the rest of the band to chase after Blackwood. Steam rises from the trail of heat left in his tracks, and Jon can feel the rubber of his boots melting against the scorching ground. Still he runs, desperate for revenge or answers or something even worse. 

Blackwood leads him outside of the venue and through the labyrinthine alleys of the neighborhood until he hits a dead end, with Jon advancing on him. 

And then Jon can’t help it. When he sees the man turn around, sees that familiar, beloved face for the first time in nearly a century, all reason goes out the window. It’s like seeing a ghost. The tape recorder in his chest aches. “Martin,” Jon says, so softly, an echo of a different time and a different universe. 

Martin looks at him with something like pity, or perhaps just curiosity. Then he lifts his ax and neatly decapitates Jon. 

* * *

Jon wakes up in a box. 

He kind of wishes he could say that’s a first for him, but of course it isn’t. Muffled voices surround him, and he realizes after a moment that he can’t feel his legs. Actually, he can’t feel anything below his neck. 

The memory of Blackwood chopping off his head comes to him in a rush, and he would probably vomit if he still had a stomach. As it is, he just stares at the dark interior of the box where Blackwood’s been keeping his severed head. 

“— should warn you, the last one left me very disappointed.” Blackwood’s voice becomes clearer, and light floods Jon’s vision as the lid to the box opens up. His head’s pointed directly at Tim, who stares at him in horror. 

He should let Tim know he’s still alive, Jon thinks. Let him know that Blackwood didn’t actually manage to kill him. 

Jon winks. 

* * *

The rest is something of a blur. Jon remembers biting Blackwood, and falling to the floor. Then smoke, screaming. A loud bang, and everything goes up in flames. Somehow, he finds himself in the wreckage of the Lunar Lounge, hacking up lungs he no longer has. 

“Jonny?” Tim says. The sound of shuffling. Jon watches Tim’s boots come into view. “Jonny, he’s dead. Blackwood’s dead. They’re… they’re all dead, I think, the whole building’s torn apart. I did it.” 

“Good job,” Jon says. 

“I can’t… I can’t see,” Tim goes on. “I think… I think the flash must’ve, the explosion… Jonny, I think I’m blind.” 

“Tragic.” It’s a little difficult for Jon to feel sorry for the man— after all, he’s still got his body. “Why don’t you pick me up and I’ll be your eyes?” 

“Um…”

“We’ll do hot and cold,” Jon groans. “Just follow the sound of my voice. Right now you’re cold. … Warmer. Nope, not that— okay, warmer…” 

As he guides Tim toward his severed head, Jon watches the flaming debris of the Lunar Lounge fall through the air around him. One scorched flier settles right in front of his face, still smoldering. And Jon realizes, suddenly, that he’d always assumed MK Blackwood stood for Martin K. Blackwood, just like  _ his _ Martin. 

But the flier in front of him advertises the now-deceased poet as Moon Kaiser Blackwood. 

Jon tries to laugh and chokes on the smoke. 


End file.
